This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Monday, May 30, 2011

The future of Green IT is Survivable IT

[Before the first battle has hardly begun we have already lost the war on climate change. We are already committed to a 2C average global temperature due to the CO2 that has been pumped into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. What is now more worrisome is that CO2 Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency.
We are only now starting up the curve of the temperature hockey stick where we are starting to experience severe weather patterns commensurate with climate change. The tornadoes in the US, floods in Australia, forest fires in Russia are only a harbinger of much worse weather that will soon effect all of us.

At some point in the near future, when the planet’s weather is constantly causing havoc and destruction, there will be a global realization that as quickly as possible we need to stop all new CO2 emissions. There will be a tipping point in public attitudes as we have seen in Germany with nuclear power where there will be a public outcry for governments to ban the mining of any more coal or digging up tar sands for dirty oil.
I am constantly amazed at how few people appreciate the seriousness of global warming. While many accept the science of climate change (although it is startling how many closet deniers who still exist even at our universities) very few understand the magnitude of the weather extremes we are going to experience in the coming decade. Some people think climate change is something that is not going to really affect us until 2100, while others see it as a problem like acid rain or ozone that can quickly be corrected through collective global action. But token steps at energy efficiency or recycling paper will have little effect on the imminent threat that is facing us.

The challenge facing us now is not mitigation i.e. trying to prevent climate change, but adaptation i.e. how will we survive climate change and the last minute desperate attempts by governments to do something about it by shutting down all fossil fuel energy production.

All of us will be affected by these coming monumental changes in weather patterns and energy. Those of us in the IT sector, especially at universities, I believe have a moral responsibility to be at the forefront of changes needed adapt to this changing world. –BSA]

Some pointers:
A good overview of the science of climate change and weather variability
http://www.skepticalscience.com/the-critical-decade-part-1-the-science.html

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About Me

Bill St. Arnaud is a consultant and research engineer who works with clients around the world on a variety of subjects such as next generation Internet networks and developing practical solutions to reduce CO2 emissions such as free broadband and dynamic charging of eVehicles. He is an author of many papers and articles on these topics and is a frequent guest speaker. For more details on my research interests see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bill_Arnaud